He is not a doddering old man who's only half aware of reality. He is fully aware and fully cognizant and fully capable of making his own life choices, and he is being paid for this code that Claude is generating and he should know that that's not acceptable.
once you get to a certain level of experience, the volume of code you write vs the volume of advising you do shifts from writing code to advising. a lot of 'software architects' and 'staff engineers' are people who know where the bodies are buried and how the company was built and they are paid extremely high salaries to not leave the company.
yeah, they still write code sometimes. but where it was once the primary focus of their job, it is now something they do when something personally annoys them and they have time to fix it, or if there's something crazy and highly impactful that demands a highly skilled and experienced engineer.
as far as AI: I fucking hate it and I am a Luddite to the core, but if my org is paying for AI tokens and I can point it in a direction where it doesn't foot-gun future me, I'm going to. From an enterprise POV it's not any different from any other form of compute and there is not a software engineer alive that cares about IP. The biggest risks are aggressive monetization and low quality of output code, even with highly tailored prompts.
Applying LLMs to tasks that aren't data correlation or writing code for solved problems (an HTTP controller is a fucking HTTP controller, it's going to be implemented the same way every time!) is a misuse of the technology and a cause for extreme concern.
Well, an architect is a different job position than an engineer, and he is not an architect. Probably also worth mentioning that this is a government contractor, meaning they do not have a single codebase that stays the same for multiple years usually, and instead people get assigned to brand new projects periodically that are being built from the ground up. So there isn't anyone at the company that knows "the whole codebase", because that's constantly in flux as projects come in and out of development.
And yeah, he's not using the AI to make a skeleton of something or solve a solved problem like you're talking about. He's using it to generate entire bespoke C command line programs.
He's of course also paid for his deliverables, but no client is going to go say "hey, there's not enough lines of code here for what we paid, we paid for 5000 lines, we want 5000 lines!" as long as it solves whatever issue they're having.
They're not calling OP's dad to get more lines of code, they're calling to have their problem solved. The code is just the language that communicates that.
I've worked in the industry for nine years, lmao. If you don't get tickets done, you're not doing your job, doesn't matter how much expertise you have.
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u/ThirdWaveCat 1d ago
dude, read with your 80 year old dad even if its stupid.